Advances in computing technology have often been geared towards providing individuals with enhanced computing environments. However, in industry it is more common to find large teams of personnel working together towards a common goal. This is particularly the case in the software industry. Hence, the provision of software engineering environments is now seen as a major task facing computing. This paper focuses on the design of an infrastructure (called Cosmos)to support software engineering environments. This infrastructure is carefully tailored to support the functionality required of a software engineering environment. Furthermore, the infrastructure assumes a distributed environment and implements mechanisms to make this distribution transparent to the user. The Cosmos system is unusual in that it combines elements of a functional system with elements of an object-oriented system. It is argued that the two views of data can be synthesis is ideally suited to supporting software engineering environments and handling distribution in an elegant manner.